Narrazioni eroopoietiche mediolatine: ‹punteggiature› nell’evoluzione delle letterature profano-volgari

Abstract

Andrea Ghidoni: Medieval Latin Heroopoietic Narratives: ‹Punctuations› in the Development of Profane Vernacular Literatures.

In the corpus of the Old-French chansons de geste, the enfances constitute a subgenre including texts on the childhood, youth and first actions of heroes more familiar to the audience of the feudal epic (Roland, Guillaume, Vivien, for example). After the rise of chivalric romance, the enfances are a terrain of vivid exchange of motifs between the two main French narrative genres. In fact, some Medieval Latin texts show some elements of enfances – if not genuine tales of heroic initiations – before the development of Romance literature, such as ‹Waltharius›, ‹Ruodlieb› – texts linked to the Germanic tradition – and perhaps even the ‹Fragment of the Hague›. This paper aims to define the ‹heroopoietic› identity of these texts and to sketch the role of those narratives in the gestation of the profane material in vernacular language, which appears in written form initially in the sphere of Medieval Latin culture – ephemeral, isolated manifestations, ‹punctuations› –, crossroads between epic-heroic, folkloric and educated traditions.